People in organizations spend an inordinate amount of time organizing and participating in meetings. These meetings have various purposes among them are status updates, problem solving, planning, brainstorming, training, decision-making, etc. The range of meetings varies from a one-to-many meeting, such as conferences and presentations, to many-to-many meetings, e.g. frequently horizontal discussions with a majority of peers among the participants, which are common among smaller divisions in an organization to informal meetings of a few people such as the ones happening when somebody drops by the office.
As these organizations move towards being more distributed over a wider geographical area, setting up and participating in these meetings takes more resources and time. Moreover, given that the participants are usually not co-located, feedback and follow-on next steps are more difficult to arrange because it is difficult to organize smaller, informal meetings to get to these next steps completed. The end result is that it requires more work from the part of the participants to get to tangible results of a meeting. Still, these meetings are considered to be the most efficient way to coordinate and get things done within organizations.
With the advent of wide area networks such as the Internet, organizations have come to adopt new technologies such as instant messaging, chatting, tele-conferencing, web-conferencing, e-learning, etc. in order to alleviate the problem of getting people to work together and of disseminating information to the right people despite them being in disparate locations. Even though online (or even offline) discussions might have a potential of breaking down the limitations of space, they are usually seen as a second best solution. The lack of richness and expressiveness in online discussions is seen as a handicap in facilitating communication between the different parties. There is a continuing effort to resolve this problem, but still, face-to-face meetings are seen as the most efficient way to resolve problems and plan work at hand in an organization.
Yet, face-to-face meetings have many problems. Some of them are associated with inherent personal social contracts in organizations between the participants. Contradicting the “boss” in some circles might be seen as a breach of protocol or a CLE (Carrier Limiting Event). Cooperating with other co-workers knowing that you are competing for the same resources and potentially the same job may become a hindrance to carrying out efficient meetings. Having a productive discussion with more than 15 people becomes a challenge in itself. Getting an honest and impartial synthesis of the ideas and conclusions discussed in a meeting is hard to come by especially as the number of participants grow. Putting together those people who would be most relevant for the meeting becomes an issue specially if the organizer is not familiar with the participants. Online meetings have not solved any of these issues. Current online messaging technologies have mostly been oriented towards resolving the issue of meeting people in distributed locations.
Against this backdrop, it will be appreciated that there exists an ongoing desire to improve the process by which participants meet and come up with tangible results that take into account the collective knowledge and the consensus of everyone involved.